Bizwatch

Deficit Mending
Last week, during negotiations among E.U. Finance Ministers, Luxembourg 's Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker sounded like a calculus professor who'd run out of blackboard space. He's struggling with a difficult problem: how to revamp the stability and growth pact  the much-violated E.U. doctrine designed to govern fiscal rectitude  a task that falls to Juncker while his country holds the rotating E.U. presidency.

The pact caps euro-zone countries' deficits at 3% of GDP; Germany and France want to change the rules on what spending gets counted in deficit calculations. Germany, for example,...